We spent some time with friends over winter break, wrapping up the morning Delta Force extraordinarily renditioned the president of Venezuela. The wife is an Indiana alum and we caught the end of the Rose Bowl over dinner one night. I have to say, we didn’t talk much about the game.
Both parents are Chicago high school teachers and graduate school friends of mine. They spent the fall with ICE agents tackling and pointing guns at their neighbors, tear-gassing and racially profiling parents outside their high schools. Their children saw what they saw, the girl two years older than my second-grader.
We all played in the snow and hotel pool, dawdled in antique shops with the kids, suffered through breakfast with an obdurate pancake house waiter – the usual stations of our family outings together. But there was an unmistakable tension throughout the visit, low but perceptible bad vibrations among the parents at the outset of a dark new year.
A few days after we returned to school and work, a veteran firearms instructor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot Renee Good in the face inside her burgundy Honda Pilot.
He will face no inquest, per the Justice Department. Case closed.
Good’s widow will be investigated for political agitation, as was Martin Luther King Jr.
Like others, I see the videos and photos from Minnesota and am struck by the raw lawlessness and violence on display. I am also struck by the waving of AR rifles fitted with quick-aim sights and sound-deadening suppressors, both ubiquitous features of modern American gun culture now on lascivious parade along Midwestern streets.
The suppressors are especially telling. They don’t silence guns as loud as ARs but they do muffle them and so save the shooter’s hearing in tight, indoor quarters like a living room or a kitchen or a bedroom. They make sustained, rapid fire from combat weapons a whole lot more pleasant for the gunman.
Now put him in a mask. Make him the law.
Comply or die.
Of course, any old civilian who can pass a background check can buy a silencer, too – and as of January 1 they’re cheaper than ever. Tucked inside their so-called Big Beautiful Bill last year, Republicans quietly ended a $200 mandatory tax for suppressors. A manufacturer website acknowledges the obvious: “[O]ne of the biggest financial and psychological barriers to suppressor ownership is gone.”
The GOP budget bill likewise ended tax stamps for short-barreled rifles, defined as any barrel shorter than 16 inches. Some short-barreled ARs have 10.5-inch barrels. Some even shorter. Famous American short-barreled rifle enthusiasts include John Dillinger, Clyde Barrow and Patty Hearst.
The Big Beautiful Bill was supported by all of Indiana’s Republican federal officeholders, including Michiana Congressman Rudy Yakym and both U.S. Senators. All are silent on the images from Minnesota – but Yakym just emailed constituents to remind them Indiana guardsmen are still patrolling D.C.
Explaining that extended deployment, Donald Trump this week said, “To me, a town looks better when you have military people.”
And paramilitary people.
Back the Badgeless.
When Vladimir Putin seized Crimea three Winter Olympics ago, he sent Little Green Men to do the advance work – unidentified masked gunmen in military fatigues.
In Minneapolis, our own Little Green Gunmen do what they want and whatchu gonna do when they come for you?
Maybe they disappear you into the maw. Maybe they spit you out of the Yukon, bleeding in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
Watch the games and they’re still shilling Papa John’s and family vacations, still hyping gambling apps.
The circus, the surface.
And below, a rent.
A rending.
